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Surprise, Surprise

There is a notion in reformed theology that a good cattleman is “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” And today was one of them – only it was a good cattlewoman: Nancy Gail Falster.

On the Mini Cattle Trail

Nancy volunteered to come help me deliver and set up the big stock trailer so as to get the herd there at the Simonds Place accustomed to coming into the corral, passing by it and not hang back; so we could catch them up for moving back to Falster Farm. We drove in and I swung around, backed up, got the measurements fixed, disconnected pulled away 50-70 feet and I indicated for Nancy to start calling them up to the dairy feed she sprinkled in the feed bunkers.

To my surprise they all, except for one baby, dashed right by the trailer and into the corrals. Astonished I told Nancy to let that baby’s mama out and close the gate. Without asking way, she did it and we quickly fixed the gate to the load up end of the stock trailer. Then up comes one mama who had her calf in the catch pen, but she had lagged behind! So we had two mamas and one baby outside. No problem, we can come back and get um, I’m thinking.

Soon I attempted to pressure then into the trailer, they just went up, balked, turned back. After several attempts, Nancy said, “just watch this.” She jumped out of the corral and fetched the remaining 5 gal bucket of ration, grabbed up a feed trough – pulling it to the front of the 30′ trailer, poured ½ bucket in there, came off, snatched up one of them big ole green bushy weeds – tearing it right out of the ground – and started to whacking and yelling at those cows to load up. Surprised, they started to jump in – all but the bulls. I jumped up behind them, closed the inner doors, and commenced to pressure the bulls to load –up too. Seeing that the two of us was determine to take the cows, they jumped on board too. I closed the rear gate and we had them! Surprise, surprise! Everybody was surprised!

Nancy figured the mama (with the baby on board) would follow the trailer home, and she did. With Nancy riding on the tail end of the trailer that mama hung right in there as we slowly eased on back to the Falster corrals. The other mama followed her calf off into the woods – I’ll get her next time I hope.

I am rearranging the herds into breeding groups for 2014 Spring calves. Cibolo and his Herd will replace Stan and Rupert there on the Simonds place. Rupert will be getting his own herd now and occupy the King Place. Of course Stan will get a few more to service in his herd this year, but I’ll keep him close, here on Falster..